Dimitrijevic, Katarina (2024) Plastic Entanglement—A visual narrative with single-use plastics. In: Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design, RSD12, 06-20 Oct 2023, Washington, D.C., USA.

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Abstract

This exploration is a self-ethnographic plastic waste engagement that visually critiques plastic pollution in nature through reuse with single-use plastic waste. I made the initial XMass [working title] installation in my garden during the COVID-19 lockdown in the UK (Dimitrijevic, 2021; KraalD, 2021). The prosumer installation mediates relations between plastics and nature. The installation has transformed over the past two years and currently sits under transpositional works in progress.

Plastic Entanglement visually explores do-it-yourself (DIY) craft tactics with single-use plastics and highlights the presence of mismanaged plastic waste in nature. The outcome is a visionary aesthetic response and visual narrative interdisciplinary connecting design with open-loop reuse, fostering novel design and nature relations and raising awareness of slow environmental violence and plastic pollution.

Through hands-on engagements, I created an aesthetically valuable environmental response with long-lasting plastic resources. In this exhibition series, I integrate craftivism—the political art of DIY craft and social design activism, theoretically entangled with new materiality (Braidotti, 2006) and feminist science (Liboiron, 2012; 2021). Through ontological design processes of making with single-use plastic, I am co-creating an aesthetic response (Hillman, 1996) to slow “environmental violence” (Liboiron, 2021, p. 88), representing mismanaged plastic waste narrative and visualising plastic pollution.

Item Type:	Conference/Workshop Item (Paper)
Divisions:	Faculty of Design
Date Deposited:	30 Jun 2026 15:12
Last Modified:	30 Jun 2026 15:15
URI:	https://openresearch.ocadu.ca/id/eprint/5168

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